Eugen Tarnow June 5 2012 09:54:45 AM

I apologize for my previous overly negative message as noted by Paul Mooney. The View and the other presenters indeed do a great job and I hope it the conferences will continue.

The low conference attendance information is still valuable. Lotusphere attracts only 1700 customer staff (estimate by Sandra Marcus, Program Director, Events, IBM) and AdminDev2012 attracts only 100 customer and business partner staff. It is a pattern that bodes very badly for Notes in the United States.

In the United States Notes development budgets have been cut for many years and this trend is not being reversed, rather it is solidified by companies now also cutting budgets for travel. Lotus Notes installations that no longer develop Notes applications are the most vulnerable to moving to other mail platforms. There is little perceived difference between Notes and other mail platforms based on mail delivery performance only. This appears to be true even in companies that have predominantly IBM software.

While the evidence is overwhelming that customers who attend Notes conference upgrade quickly to the newest Notes version, I wonder if the same is true for customers who no longer attend Notes conferences?

Will there be a floor preventing Notes from disappearing altogether in the United States? If so, what will that be?

NOTE: The conference attendance numbers are for the United States, does anyone have any data of conference attendance in other countries?

I presented 4 sessions and a 3hr jumpstart at Admin Dev in Washington (on Traveler and Connections) and I definitely had more than 20 people in each of my sessions alone so your figure that were only about 20 admins there is way off. I wasn't the only Admin presenter at any one time and I definitely didn't have the entire admin audience in my rooms.

I'm with Gab on that. I had more than 20 people in every one of my sessions as well. That being said keep in mind that Notes, while it may be in decline is also a mature technology from an administration standpoint. The core functionality has been around for almost 20 years and the last major feature releases in terms of administration and management was two to three years ago. It would be expected that since people have very limited budgets for training that they would probably be spending it on things that are very new. Likewise you are not going to see too many people picking up Notes Administration as newbies these days.